Holocaust survivors help Oak Park students dedicate Wall of Tolerance

VINIT SATYAVRATA/SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Manny Fischman (center) hugs Ally Spooner (left) after he and Henriette Shartel (right) unveiled the Wall of Tolerance on Tuesday at Medea Creek Middle School in Oak Park. Fischman and Shartel were at the school to speak to students about their experiences as Holocaust survivors.

VENTURA COUNTY STAR

VINIT SATYAVRATA/SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Sharon Levine (left) holds the microphone for Henriette Shartel as she describes her experience surviving the Holocaust to students at Medea Creek Middle School in Oak Park.

VENTURA COUNTY STAR

VINIT SATYAVRATA/SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Henriette Shartel speaks Tuesday about her experience surviving the Holocaust to students at Medea Creek Middle School in Oak Park.

VENTURA COUNTY STAR

Manny Fischman’s voice crackles with age, silence punctuates each sentence. The Medea Creek Middle School gymnasium is reverently quiet except for the occasional creek of a metal foldup chair.

In 1944, Fischman was 14 years old living in Romania when the German-controlled Hungarian army invaded, sending his family first to a ghetto, then — “Auschwitz,” Fischman said, his voice hitting peak volume. He was forced to work as a brick layer at the concentration camp until its fall later that year, when he was moved to Buchenwald.

Henriette Shartel, wearing a black and turquoise print dress, was 12 and living in Holland when she was forced from school and into hiding from Nazi persecution. She spent years staying indoors at all times, never stepping within a yard of a window.

Fischman and Shartel brought history books to life Tuesday at Medea Creek Middle School in Oak Park, providing firsthand accounts of the Holocaust to several groups of 12- and 13-year-old students.

“I have an obligation to those Jews that had been murdered,” Fischman said to a group of students. “Before they died, they said ‘tell the world what they did to us.’”

Kathryn Dusek, one of the seventh-grade humanities teachers, stood up to thank Fischman.

“They will never forget this story,” Dusek said. “And our goal is — ‘never again,’” students joined in unison.

The seventh grade class at Medea Creek had just finished reading the diaries of Anne Frank, culminating their studies of the Holocaust with visits from Fischman and Shartel and the dedication of the school’s new Tolerance Wall.

The schoolyard mural was installed in response to the nationwide concern over bullying. The wall is a student-driven project that hopefully will build a culture of tolerance and acceptance at Medea Creek, administrators said.

“We need this constant reminder daily,” said Sharon Lavene, chair of the seventh grade humanities department. “We just wanted to make sure they know their actions count.”

In a brief lunchtime ceremony, more than a hundred students crowded around. Some watched from the railings of second-story classrooms.

“This is the start of a bully-free nation and this is the day we say no more,” said eight-grader Shaun Merritt and a member of the school’s Safe School Ambassador program.

Teachers, with the help of Fischman, tore off the plastic covering the mural, revealing the word “Tolerance” in big blue letters. Students also wrote personal messages about tolerance on Post-it notes and stuck them to the mural.

“We all came together to make our school a safer place emotionally” Merritt said later. “I think that having a student body (working on problems) instead of teachers or administrators has worked because we can see what’s going on a lot better.”

So last year, teachers divided their 300 seventh-graders into “corporations” to develop a campaign to tackle a real problem on campus, Lavene said. Instead of an “anti-bullying campaign,” teachers wanted to take a positive approach, which meant teaching tolerance.

The groups even had their own PR and marketing departments. Teachers and administrators later voted on the best campaign: the Tolerance Wall.

Both Fischman and Shartel lost their entire families in the Holocaust.

Determined never to return to Romania, Fischman eventually moved to New York after he was liberated from Buchenwald in 1945. He eventually moved to Los Angeles with his wife and now has three children and 12 grandchildren.

During her time in hiding, Shartel was treated like a daughter by her protector, a woman named Nell. Nell is now 101-years-old and living in Australia. Shartel calls her every Sunday.

Shartel lives in Westlake Village, not far from her daughter and four grandchildren. She never did make it back to school, though.